Raise rates how, exactly? I've been on the same $40 cell plan through Verizon since early 2005. Every 2 years or so I just renew the same plan I had before. The only change is I added the $25 unlimited data this summer. I also know someone that is a tech for Verizon, and he informed me that they don't throttle or cap data overage, even for the unlimited plan.
The problem is that rates in the US overall are far higher than most other places. My friends in Europe tell me they pay something like 15-20 euros for the same unlimited data plan.
Early on something like Lego Mindstorms is good, as others have mentioned. A good thing a bit later on may be experimenting with one of the many free game design engines out there. Something like the Unity engine has a great drag-and-drop IDE compatible with Mac and PC, and supports programming in multiple languages. Simple mini-games and platformer shooters would be a great way to pique their interest if they are so inclined.
I worked at a Fedex sorting facility for 2 days through a temp service. I can assure you the same type of manhandling occurred there as well. Guys were heaving boxes out of the trucks sometimes up to 5ft through the air before they hit the belt and tumbled over several times.
Ironically enough, 35% of what we unloaded that day were PCs and monitors from the vendor I had worked for that past summer. We wondered why we kept getting customer complaints of unseated video cards, HDDs, etc. I went back the next summer and told them about what happened at Fedex, and was told there was nothing they could expect to change except extra securing for the innards of the PCs...
The 2008 Olympics had a website with most events viewable on-demand. In the US I believe it was provided by NBC, and ran on Silverlight technology. I can't remember exactly, but there may have been a premium streaming package you could pay for as well. I would imagine similar will be available for 2012.
I was actually disappointed that the 2010 Winter Olympics didn't feature the same sort of streaming coverage. Unless you had a cable package you were SOL outside of the limited primetime coverage from NBC.
I'm glad to see the NY Times is able to make some good revenue off their site, but this probably only works for the larger papers.
Large influential papers like the NY Times and Wall St. Journal have a certain level of clout and original content that people are willing to pay for. It's highly unlikely that your local newspaper is going to make any reasonable amount of money off of creating a paywall. Most local papers feature largely wire stories you can find online from thousands of other papers. More circumstantial -- but it's also been my observation that the "younger generations" increasingly don't care about local interest stories or Prep Sports that may be in the local papers -- which is usually the only original content they offer.
So in the long run, I can see this saving a handful of the largest national papers, but I feel most local papers will be in even more trouble in the future.
Can't you just renew your plan or keep it going? It was my understanding that as long as you don't adjust that part of your plan coverage, you get to keep it going. I've had the exact same mobile plan from Verizon for going on 6 years now and it's never changed even in the periods between me renewing the 2year contract. Unless something is changed you should be able to just renew another 2 year contract or stay month-to-month and keep the unlimited data.
I always take pleasure in seeing if anyone is looking at the AV cable section at Best Buy and informing them they can get them online for $4 instead of $40.
So essentially they want to charge a monthly fee for stat tracking and pre-match chat? HLstats and similar stat trackers have been around for the PC market for over 10 years now. Pre-match chat isn't exactly a new novelty either.
Yet another example of a greedy company charging for "features" that have been around free for years...
Did they really have a million subscribers to the North American servers? I remember playing the English alpha/beta test for Lineage1 way back when, and the game felt dated even back then. There was a steep learning curve, pointless grinding, and not all that much to do.
That said, the game met large success in SE Asia at least, with something like 4million+ accounts there alone. At the same time that North America was considering Everquest1 a huge success with 500k subscribers.
You know, I would actually be willing to pay for a Japanese TV package via internet stream if it were available at a decent price. Unfortunately, the only IPTV I've seen has been offered by dubious SE asian sources at either terrible stream qualities, or at outrageous prices. (Standard 15 channels they offer on cable over there for like $100/month, for ex) Depending on the American cable provider, they have some premium packages -- but they also tend to only be like NHK and 1-2 other channels for like $50/month...
I'm not really into the whole Vocaloid thing, but I remember there was something about a CD of Vocaloid music topping the charts there last year or such. A little Googling comes up with this excerpt: http://myanimelist.net/forum/?topicid=211424
Granted, it was only for one week, but still considering the "singer" is computer-generated, it's interesting.
"According to Oricon news, VOCALOID Hatsune Miku's album "EXIT TUNES PRESENTS Vocalogenesis feat. Hatsune Miku" has won the top in the weekly album CD sales ranking for May 17th - May 23rd. It's for the first time that a VOCALOID CD is ranked first in the weekly CD sales ranking. The album also includes the songs of other VOCALOIDs such as Kagamine Rin, Len, Megurine Luka, Meiko and Kaito. The cover illustration was drawn by Miwa Shirow. Note that the sales of the CD, 23,000 copies, are the smallest number in Oricon's history among all the top sellers of the weekly CD rankings, reflecting the shrinkage of the CD market in Japan."
In all fairness, as much as I hate Best Buy, they do offer some "cheaper" HDMI cables now from what I've seen. $30 for the Dynex 6', $40 for the Monster one.
I feel slightly bad for people who are duped into buying these cables, but OTOH they should be doing their homework before buying things they don't know about. Walmart offers HDMI cables for as cheap as $10 for 6 foot ones. A simple Google search for HDMI cable pricing would lead you to sites like Monoprice et al that charge under $5 for a basic HDMI cable, etc. And this isn't anything new. Printer cables and adapters have been marked up for years -- they are the largest profit maker for retailers.
(In the mid-90s I worked for CompUSA and their 6' printer cables were $35 when the cost in the system said $3. Of course the margin on selling the printer itself was like $3-10...)
I don't know what they want with Starcraft2, honestly. They claim to want an "e-Sport" (Whatever that is.) but no LAN kills off all but the largest tournaments due to most hotel/convention internet being terrible for ping. It also makes it difficult for grass-roots interest in the game to happen when their Matchmaking and Friends system is archaic to say the least. It's like taking the rudimentary matchmaking from Mario Kart DS, mixed with the obnoxious friend code requirement from Animal Crossing.
As others have said -- I have a feeling it's all some ulterior motive from Kotick to try to cash in on Blizzard or Starcraft in some anti-gamer way.
Imagine that -- a professional special effects person spending over $1000 was able to make a costume able to put all amateurs to shame. It's still amazing, but the guy obviously does this kind of stuff for a living and has lots of disposable income.
That is seriously a lot of wonderflex, foam, etc. I wonder how he stilted the legs to get himself that high. Or if the extended arms will actually have articulated hands.
A few years ago I had directions from Mapquest that told me to head the wrong way up a One Way road to get to my destination. I guess I should have gotten into a head-on collision and sued Mapquest....
I'm not entirely certain about what fees may be associated with using a debit payment, but I hope this doesn't mean we're facing a future of de-facto lining the corporate pockets of major credit companies like Mastercard and Visa. Even debit cards generally have the Mastercard/Visa logo on them... does this mean they still see a fee even when using it as a debit transaction?
Our national debt went from 4 trillion to over 8 trillion during Bush's tenure in what was supposedly very good economic times. The economic policies pursued during that same administration led to the greatest economic meltdown the country has seen in 80 years. The stimulus package planning was begun under the Bush administration, and finalized in the early months under Obama in order to partially mitigate the poor choices made by our banks and Wall Street.
A number of recent economic markers are pointing to the economy starting to be on the way up again -- I would say that 12-18 months turnaround on this depression is fairly quick compared to recessions of the past. FDR's economic policies in the 30s may have been shocking back then, but Americans expect far more "socialist" programs out of their government nowadays. Not spending any money certainly wouldn't lead to less unemployment, and very likely would cause the depression to last longer as the banks are still hesitant to do any sort of major lending -- which leads to companies hesitant to do new hiring.
I think the funniest part of that video is at 5:25 where the cabinet falls over that the guy had tried putting things on top of earlier to save them...
Anyone else think it's bordering on insanity the charges they want to levy against people for wireless data transfers? (Text messages is a whole other topic...) Even the new download caps some cable ISPs are setting for home broadband are still at least 100GB for a connection you spend ~$50 for. Why is it worth thousands of dollars to send a GB of data when a normal phone conversation is going to take up far more network bandwidth...
I think the obvious assumption is that he chose the photo specifically because they were from the US and unlikely to ever see the advertisement in his window. He just had the bad luck of the 1 in a million coincidence that someone else who knew the family also happened to be in Prague and notice the picture.
I meant if it tried to charge off of the power line. I don't know what the actual voltage is on residential lines, but I would imagine considerably more than the 240/440 that runs up to your house from the transformer.
Assuming it wouldn't get fried out by the voltage in the line before the transformer? I doubt it could balance on something as thin as a power line though, anyways.
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Raise rates how, exactly? I've been on the same $40 cell plan through Verizon since early 2005. Every 2 years or so I just renew the same plan I had before. The only change is I added the $25 unlimited data this summer. I also know someone that is a tech for Verizon, and he informed me that they don't throttle or cap data overage, even for the unlimited plan.
The problem is that rates in the US overall are far higher than most other places. My friends in Europe tell me they pay something like 15-20 euros for the same unlimited data plan.
Early on something like Lego Mindstorms is good, as others have mentioned. A good thing a bit later on may be experimenting with one of the many free game design engines out there. Something like the Unity engine has a great drag-and-drop IDE compatible with Mac and PC, and supports programming in multiple languages. Simple mini-games and platformer shooters would be a great way to pique their interest if they are so inclined.
I worked at a Fedex sorting facility for 2 days through a temp service. I can assure you the same type of manhandling occurred there as well. Guys were heaving boxes out of the trucks sometimes up to 5ft through the air before they hit the belt and tumbled over several times.
Ironically enough, 35% of what we unloaded that day were PCs and monitors from the vendor I had worked for that past summer. We wondered why we kept getting customer complaints of unseated video cards, HDDs, etc. I went back the next summer and told them about what happened at Fedex, and was told there was nothing they could expect to change except extra securing for the innards of the PCs...
The 2008 Olympics had a website with most events viewable on-demand. In the US I believe it was provided by NBC, and ran on Silverlight technology. I can't remember exactly, but there may have been a premium streaming package you could pay for as well. I would imagine similar will be available for 2012.
I was actually disappointed that the 2010 Winter Olympics didn't feature the same sort of streaming coverage. Unless you had a cable package you were SOL outside of the limited primetime coverage from NBC.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QAKNjEi3Xao
It's technically true. The "best" kind of truth.
Just not for anything BUT smartphones I guess...
I'm glad to see the NY Times is able to make some good revenue off their site, but this probably only works for the larger papers.
Large influential papers like the NY Times and Wall St. Journal have a certain level of clout and original content that people are willing to pay for. It's highly unlikely that your local newspaper is going to make any reasonable amount of money off of creating a paywall. Most local papers feature largely wire stories you can find online from thousands of other papers. More circumstantial -- but it's also been my observation that the "younger generations" increasingly don't care about local interest stories or Prep Sports that may be in the local papers -- which is usually the only original content they offer.
So in the long run, I can see this saving a handful of the largest national papers, but I feel most local papers will be in even more trouble in the future.
Can't you just renew your plan or keep it going? It was my understanding that as long as you don't adjust that part of your plan coverage, you get to keep it going. I've had the exact same mobile plan from Verizon for going on 6 years now and it's never changed even in the periods between me renewing the 2year contract. Unless something is changed you should be able to just renew another 2 year contract or stay month-to-month and keep the unlimited data.
I always take pleasure in seeing if anyone is looking at the AV cable section at Best Buy and informing them they can get them online for $4 instead of $40.
So essentially they want to charge a monthly fee for stat tracking and pre-match chat? HLstats and similar stat trackers have been around for the PC market for over 10 years now. Pre-match chat isn't exactly a new novelty either.
Yet another example of a greedy company charging for "features" that have been around free for years...
Did they really have a million subscribers to the North American servers? I remember playing the English alpha/beta test for Lineage1 way back when, and the game felt dated even back then. There was a steep learning curve, pointless grinding, and not all that much to do.
That said, the game met large success in SE Asia at least, with something like 4million+ accounts there alone. At the same time that North America was considering Everquest1 a huge success with 500k subscribers.
You know, I would actually be willing to pay for a Japanese TV package via internet stream if it were available at a decent price. Unfortunately, the only IPTV I've seen has been offered by dubious SE asian sources at either terrible stream qualities, or at outrageous prices. (Standard 15 channels they offer on cable over there for like $100/month, for ex) Depending on the American cable provider, they have some premium packages -- but they also tend to only be like NHK and 1-2 other channels for like $50/month...
I'm not really into the whole Vocaloid thing, but I remember there was something about a CD of Vocaloid music topping the charts there last year or such. A little Googling comes up with this excerpt:
http://myanimelist.net/forum/?topicid=211424
Granted, it was only for one week, but still considering the "singer" is computer-generated, it's interesting.
"According to Oricon news, VOCALOID Hatsune Miku's album "EXIT TUNES PRESENTS Vocalogenesis feat. Hatsune Miku" has won the top in the weekly album CD sales ranking for May 17th - May 23rd. It's for the first time that a VOCALOID CD is ranked first in the weekly CD sales ranking. The album also includes the songs of other VOCALOIDs such as Kagamine Rin, Len, Megurine Luka, Meiko and Kaito. The cover illustration was drawn by Miwa Shirow.
Note that the sales of the CD, 23,000 copies, are the smallest number in Oricon's history among all the top sellers of the weekly CD rankings, reflecting the shrinkage of the CD market in Japan."
In all fairness, as much as I hate Best Buy, they do offer some "cheaper" HDMI cables now from what I've seen. $30 for the Dynex 6', $40 for the Monster one.
I feel slightly bad for people who are duped into buying these cables, but OTOH they should be doing their homework before buying things they don't know about. Walmart offers HDMI cables for as cheap as $10 for 6 foot ones. A simple Google search for HDMI cable pricing would lead you to sites like Monoprice et al that charge under $5 for a basic HDMI cable, etc. And this isn't anything new. Printer cables and adapters have been marked up for years -- they are the largest profit maker for retailers.
(In the mid-90s I worked for CompUSA and their 6' printer cables were $35 when the cost in the system said $3. Of course the margin on selling the printer itself was like $3-10...)
I don't know what they want with Starcraft2, honestly. They claim to want an "e-Sport" (Whatever that is.) but no LAN kills off all but the largest tournaments due to most hotel/convention internet being terrible for ping. It also makes it difficult for grass-roots interest in the game to happen when their Matchmaking and Friends system is archaic to say the least. It's like taking the rudimentary matchmaking from Mario Kart DS, mixed with the obnoxious friend code requirement from Animal Crossing.
As others have said -- I have a feeling it's all some ulterior motive from Kotick to try to cash in on Blizzard or Starcraft in some anti-gamer way.
Imagine that -- a professional special effects person spending over $1000 was able to make a costume able to put all amateurs to shame. It's still amazing, but the guy obviously does this kind of stuff for a living and has lots of disposable income.
That is seriously a lot of wonderflex, foam, etc. I wonder how he stilted the legs to get himself that high. Or if the extended arms will actually have articulated hands.
Remember -- it's always cancer.
A few years ago I had directions from Mapquest that told me to head the wrong way up a One Way road to get to my destination. I guess I should have gotten into a head-on collision and sued Mapquest....
I'm not entirely certain about what fees may be associated with using a debit payment, but I hope this doesn't mean we're facing a future of de-facto lining the corporate pockets of major credit companies like Mastercard and Visa. Even debit cards generally have the Mastercard/Visa logo on them ... does this mean they still see a fee even when using it as a debit transaction?
Our national debt went from 4 trillion to over 8 trillion during Bush's tenure in what was supposedly very good economic times. The economic policies pursued during that same administration led to the greatest economic meltdown the country has seen in 80 years. The stimulus package planning was begun under the Bush administration, and finalized in the early months under Obama in order to partially mitigate the poor choices made by our banks and Wall Street.
A number of recent economic markers are pointing to the economy starting to be on the way up again -- I would say that 12-18 months turnaround on this depression is fairly quick compared to recessions of the past. FDR's economic policies in the 30s may have been shocking back then, but Americans expect far more "socialist" programs out of their government nowadays. Not spending any money certainly wouldn't lead to less unemployment, and very likely would cause the depression to last longer as the banks are still hesitant to do any sort of major lending -- which leads to companies hesitant to do new hiring.
I think the funniest part of that video is at 5:25 where the cabinet falls over that the guy had tried putting things on top of earlier to save them...
That tree is stuck in an endless recursion of time.
Remember to bring your bicycle and plenty of money!
Anyone else think it's bordering on insanity the charges they want to levy against people for wireless data transfers? (Text messages is a whole other topic...) Even the new download caps some cable ISPs are setting for home broadband are still at least 100GB for a connection you spend ~$50 for. Why is it worth thousands of dollars to send a GB of data when a normal phone conversation is going to take up far more network bandwidth...
I think the obvious assumption is that he chose the photo specifically because they were from the US and unlikely to ever see the advertisement in his window. He just had the bad luck of the 1 in a million coincidence that someone else who knew the family also happened to be in Prague and notice the picture.
I meant if it tried to charge off of the power line. I don't know what the actual voltage is on residential lines, but I would imagine considerably more than the 240/440 that runs up to your house from the transformer.
Assuming it wouldn't get fried out by the voltage in the line before the transformer? I doubt it could balance on something as thin as a power line though, anyways.